“Not for me, my dear.”
“Tea? There’s some green tea somewhere. That’s good for the heart.”
“No. Nothing.” He sounds distracted, but not by grief. He’s staring at the floor beside his feet.
“That’s Federico’s case, isn’t it?” Helen says, the two halves of the coffee pot damp in her hands. He doesn’t seem to hear. He has walked across the room and is sitting in the office chair they use when they work at the computer. She asks him again.
“Yes,” he says after a moment. “It’s his laptop. He forgot it yesterday.” He rubs his forehead. “Not yesterday. The day before.”
“I didn’t know you’d seen each other. I thought he’d been at work all day. At the ministry, I mean. He didn’t say he’d seen you.”
“Didn’t he?” says Fausto.
“Federico didn’t tell me everything,” she says. She’s hurt but doesn’t want to show how much.
“We were working on the conference. He disliked working on it at the ministry. The conference was his idea, it had nothing to with the department. He must have told me a hundred times these last few weeks it was the only thing that kept him sane.”
“Sane?”
“You know that it hasn’t been easy recently, at the ministry, I mean. He had too much on his shoulders.” Fausto sounds reproachful. Helen wants to say
Of course I know
, but the truth is that she doesn’t. She hasn’t known anything about her husband’s threatened sanity until a moment ago and now she can’t understand why no one has spoken to her about it, Federico above all; even more, that he has chosen to speak to his father. “He wanted to talk to us about a document he’d been working on. Something to do with the opening.”
“Us?”
“His mother, Helen. Me.” As if to say, who else? He pushes the chair away from the desk with impatience, using both hands. His feet barely touch the floor as he comes to a halt. With a moan of pain, stretching the muscles in his back, he crosses the room and takes the two halves of the coffee pot from her hands. She is startled, she’s forgotten she’s still holding them. She watches him rinse the pot under the tap again. “I’ll do that,” she says, but he waves her away. Neither of them speak, as though the business of making coffee is all they need to distract them. It is bubbling up before he turns to look at her.
“I didn’t want to tell you this, but Giulia will if I don’t and I think it’s better coming from me. The PM has been trying to persuade Bush to extend his visit by a day, so that he can be present at the funeral.”
“I’m not having Bush at the funeral,” says Helen. “Fede despised him. It’s out of the question. What funeral anyway? I haven’t even had a chance to think about the funeral yet. Why haven’t I been asked about this?”
“There’ll be pressure though. For a state funeral.” He hesitates. “Giulia wouldn’t mind one either. She’s taking it with great courage. I’m not surprised, of course, knowing Giulia. I don’t know how she can bear to have gone to that thing this morning, standing there with everyone looking at her to see how she’s coping.”
“It’s the last thing Federico would want.” Helen shudders. “I don’t know what Giulia’s thinking of.” She can see her mother-in-law now, her tight drawn face and exquisite tailored suit, her hair in the chignon retired ballerinas adopt to show off their necks, stiff as a ramrod, as the troops file past her, too proud to show emotion, her one child dead. She’ll be planning the funeral in her head, thinks Helen with a kind of fury. Federico, sane?
When the coffee bubbles up and over the ring, she pushes past Fausto to turn off the heat. She picks up a cloth, then stands with it in her hand, her anger suddenly turning on him, who lets himself be led, who has brought her this news about Federico. She wants to tell him to leave the flat, but doesn’t know how.
He takes the cloth from her and squeezes her hand, more firmly than she likes, a hard bony grasp, but she doesn’t pull away. Just as suddenly, and against all sense, she is filled with love for this anxious old man who has lost his son and is standing in this room with her, with this bond and this barrier between them. You must know more than you’ve told me, she wants to say, Federico always spoke to you before he spoke to me, about these things at least. She allows him to hold her until his grip loosens finally, then eases her hand from his as slowly and gently as she can and embraces him a second time.
“You can cry with me,” she says, “I need someone to cry with.” She presses his head against her neck, feeling his hair on her lips. He hasn’t been able to do this with Giulia, she thinks, for all her celebrated courage. And they call it a marriage. She feels a moment’s triumph. She wonders for a moment what the word marriage means.
By eleven, Helen is showered and dressed, and alone. She looks in the fridge for something to eat, because she feels she ought to eat. But all she can find is a crust of parmesan and a brown paper bag containing three vine tomatoes. It was her job to do the shopping yesterday, her job to buy the cold cuts and salad and artichokes they would have eaten, and the fruit and the fresh crisp pizza bread to go with the Stilton, wherever that is now, in some forensic freezer made of stainless steel, or forgotten and starting to stink in a plastic bag in some office. Or maybe it is still inside the shop, because she still doesn’t know at what point he was shot, on his way in or leaving. She still doesn’t know what happened, not entirely. She still doesn’t know how he died, how long it took the ambulance to get there, how many times he must have asked for her and wondered where she was. No one has told her about his last few moments, in the hospital, whether he was aware or not, aware that he’d been left to die alone. She tries to imagine what it must be like to know you are about to die, your hand pressed hard where the bullet went in, to staunch the blood, your cheek against the sawdust on the shop floor and beneath that the smoothness of the tiles. Your last sensation the coldness of the marble, the smell of cheese, shouting that slowly fades away until you’re being lifted up and jolted back to life as they carry you into an ambulance and you hear the sirens, which move with you, which are there for you. She isn’t sure why she is imagining this; to do as much harm to herself as she can, perhaps. “I’d do anything for it not to have happened,” she says out loud, her voice sounding strange to her in the silent room, then pauses, as if waiting for an answer, as if her claim might be challenged. As if Federico might ask her about Giacomo and she won’t know what to say.
Eventually, she closes the fridge door and discovers in a cupboard half a packet of biscuits, slightly stale. She makes herself some weak Italian tea, without milk or lemon, to dip them into. When the biscuits are eaten, she sits with her elbows on the worktop, holding the cup in both hands, and lets her eyes drift round the room, the piano, the paintings she has bought and hung, the new books piled on a painted wooden chest; moving closer, into the space of the kitchen, a woven plait of garlic, the blackboard with the row of keys hanging off it and Federico’s last written word, OLIVES, scribbled in English only moments before they left the flat; she’d have forgotten them, she thinks now, and he would have been annoyed with her, and sent her out to find some. They settle in the end on Federico’s small bone-handled knife, his favourite. How many times she’s envied the deft way he uses it to slice courgettes, slice open packets, crush garlic; he’s had it as long as she has known him, since their time in Cambridge. She picks it up and holds it with the edge of the blade against her palm and then higher, at the level of her wrist. She thinks, as she often thinks with knives, a little pressure, that’s all it would need, although she has never seriously wanted to take her own life; she has merely wondered what it might be like to want to, and then to do it. She has never been as close to it as she is now, it occurs to her. Suicide must be a kind of numbness. A friend of hers, years ago, who believed in séances and divination, told her that a palm with a single line across it, in which the head and the heart line are one, had been enough to convict a man of murder in the middle ages. The hand doesn’t lie, she said, and Helen often looks at palms in search of this single line, but has found it only once, on the hand of a man who’d asked her for money in the street. She stepped back, startled, as though she’d seen a ghost. As if that were all it took, she thinks, to identify a murderer. A show of hands to see who the guilty one is. The way they used to make us all hold our hands out after school assembly to make sure they were washed. Rows of girls with their arms outstretched, palms up, sleeves pulled back to the elbows, waiting for one of us to be dragged off by the wrists into the bathrooms, wondering who it would be.
When the doorbell rings, she starts with shock and nicks her wrist on the knife blade. She crosses to the entry phone, lifting the cut to her mouth to lick the blood away. The last word he wrote in his life was OLIVES. We never run out of olives, she thinks, I must buy olives, then brushes the thought away as too painful. Perhaps this time it will be someone she wants to see and not a journalist, and she will let them up. She picks up the phone. There, by her feet, as if to taunt her, is Federico’s laptop in its neat black case.
2
Giacomo is woken at 7am by the noise of traffic, the overhead droning of helicopters. He lifts his head from the pillow and sees that Yvonne has opened the bedroom window and is staring down into Via Veneto. She is wearing a pale, translucent robe he has never seen before that barely covers her bottom, and he is excited until he remembers, with a sensation akin to panic, that Federico, his oldest friend, has been shot and is lying dead in a hospital no more than a mile from their hotel. And because he can’t bear to think of Federico before him on a metal shelf, beneath a plastic sheet, he lies back and lets images from the news the previous evening return to him. He didn’t get to bed until past 2am, what with specials and news flashes of one sort or another, although there was nothing new to report. Comment is news of a kind, it’s what stands in for news and then all at once the event has ceased to happen, there is only its reverberation. That’s a nice idea, he thinks, abruptly cheered, and is about to jot it down in his notebook when Yvonne turns into the room towards him and he sees her small breasts through the floating fabric and whispers to her to come over, his voice early-morning rough. She shakes her head.
“Who are you?” she says, her bottom lip in a pout that might be serious or merely playful; he doesn’t know her well enough to be sure.
“I’m sorry?” He’d tried to make her watch the TV with him, so that she’d know what they are talking about. Not just Federico now, but then. And not just Federico, but all of them. Layers of truth and lies so artfully blended no one knew which was which. “Look,” he’d said, thinking she
must
learn Italian sooner or later,
must
make the effort, for him if for no other reason, he couldn’t spend all his life interpreting for her. But she’d turned her back to him; asleep or faking, it came to the same thing.
“What were they saying about you on TV last night?” she says now. “Those photographs of you and your name all the time. Giacomo Mura this, Giacomo Mura that. I heard them say your name a hundred times, as though you were the one who has been murdered and not your friend. If that’s what he was.”
“I’ve already explained it to you.” He wants her to come to bed, badly. He sits up, pushing the sheet away from him to free his hips, and reaches to clutch at her robe. But she moves away with a whimper of distaste.
“I don’t think I want to make love to you,” she says, and it occurs to him how incapable he is of reading her tone. Is this flirtation? Distaste? “Now that I know what a wicked man you’ve been. A violent, naughty man.” It never worried Helen, he thinks, the secret names, the subterfuge. Even the boring parts exhilarated her, like the
longueurs
of the films they used to watch with such passion, skyscrapers and sleeping men and the slow mute churning of washing machines, the riveting boredom of endlessly repeated acts. She followed him once, from one side of Turin to the other, imagining she hadn’t been seen, darting from door to door like an actress in some two-bit film noir. He led her a merry dance, but she deserved it. He wonders if she remembers now, or whether she has chosen to forget, the violence and the excitement of those days, as though the world would actually be changed by what they did. That was when she told him something she’d heard at Cambridge: a crank is a small thing that starts a revolution. He hadn’t understood at first, not until Helen explained the double sense of crank, and then he’d loved it, quoted it endlessly, convinced of its truth, convinced that madness, his own or the collective madness of them all, would change the world. A hand on a crank, a hundred, a hundred thousand hands. Maybe he still thinks that; it’s just that his notion of madness has changed. Now, when he thinks of power, he sees a strutting demagogue in a double-breasted suit surrounded by goons, and wonders what drives him, and others like him, scattered across the palaces of the world. Is all this madness too? And if it isn’t, might madness be any better?
Ten minutes later, sitting on the lavatory while Yvonne, humming, makes up her face in the bedroom next door, Giacomo is reading an article about himself in that day’s copy of
Il Foglio
with a mixture of disgust and satisfaction. The journalist is a man he remembers not by his real name, Adriano Testa, but as Little White Mouse,
Topino Bianco
, a codename provided unwittingly by his then girlfriend. She’d used the term one morning to describe his dick, though naturally he hadn’t been told. And what was
her
name? Anna Something. Utterly mortified when she found out, he remembers now, amused. You can’t call him that, she said. He’ll realise. Now, there’s naïveté, he thought. It wouldn’t hurt to tell him now, though. Pompous piece of shit.
The article isn’t bad, he’ll admit that. Most of the facts correspond more or less to the truth as Giacomo recalls it. The six months spent without trial in San Vittore after Moro’s death, followed by his release for lack of evidence. High-profile campaigning against the special anti-terrorist laws, using his own case as an example. Enemies made, etc. A list of the great and good. His subsequent arrest as the brain behind a series of ideologically motivated bank jobs, security van heists, break-ins. No actual blood on his hands, no careless gun fire. No deaths. No one has ever accused him directly of that, although what was the money stolen for if not for arms? What was the purpose of the arms if not to kill? Court appearances, declamations, manifestos, silence. Sentenced to eight years, increased on appeal. Elected to the House of Deputies as a radical, released to take his seat. Little White Mouse makes it all sound like snakes and ladders, but wilful too, and as though something infinitely nasty was lurking beneath it all. Immunity revoked, but by that time he’d left his seat and moved to France, making a name for himself as a man with an intellectual mission. The then president persuaded by popular pressure (that is, by a handful of journalists that included Federico’s father) to issue an official pardon. Now ageing
enfant terrible
in Paris. Settling his buttocks more comfortably, Giacomo skims through the piece again. Nothing overtly stated, everything implied. The photographs part of the overall effect. Next to the classic image of Aldo Moro, the kidnapped elder statesman, newspaper in hand with the five-pointed Red Brigades star on the wall behind him, there is Giacomo standing beneath a banner with the same crude star on it, his Che Guevara beret impeccably tilted to the left, his right hand raised in a fist. Cheap, but effective. And that isn’t all of it. Giacomo, grinning behind the bars of the cage in the court room, like some chained beast. Giacomo entering Parliament to take his seat with the same fuck-you grin, in a suit he’d borrowed from someone – Federico? He doesn’t remember – that didn’t quite fit, too tight across the chest; already putting on weight, the easy life just about to start. An older, altogether tidier and more affluent Giacomo with Mitterrand, a particularly spiteful choice this one, the two of them looking as though they’ve just had sex, by some physiological fluke smiling dreamily at each other, with no one else in sight. Has everyone else been whited out? Photoshopped out? But by whom? The Stalinist training showing through. Altogether, a more than competent hatchet job, thinks Giacomo, nothing quite libellous, nothing worth getting the lawyers in for. Little White Mouse has been itching to do this for years, lousy in bed and bitter with it. Decades of hating Giacomo, hardly surprising given his own rather less spectacular career trajectory. From pseudo-Maoist in 1976 to jobbing hack for the self-appointed king of dumbed-down television, dumbed-down politics, dumbed-down Italy. He isn’t exactly going to love me, thinks Giacomo as he raises himself from the lavatory to see what he’s produced, then puts down the paper, satisfied, to wipe his arse. Could have killed two birds with one stone, it strikes him a moment later, as he straightens up to flush. Could have wiped my arse on the article. How much his having read it has made him feel that he is back in Italy, at home. This use of a good man’s death to settle an old score.